Is the amount of evidence really the defining difference between a theory and a hypothesis? My formal scientific education ended back in high school, so maybe I'm wrong here, but I thought a hypothesis was more of a prediction about the results of a specific experiment or observation, while a theory was a proposed set of rules that worked in a more general sense.
A simple theory of gravity might be "all matter attracts each other", while a related hypothesis could be "If I release this this rock off the edge of a building, the mass of the earth will attract the mass of the rock and the rock will fall."
Another thing that's nice about touchscreens is that the relative sizes of various buttons can change on the fly. The iPhone virtual keyboard dynamically resizes the area of different letters depending on what letter proceeded it. For example, if you just typed the letter 'c', the next letter you want is much more likely to be 'a' than 'z', so the 'a' button area becomes larger and the 'z' gets smaller. It doesn't change the visual size of the button on screen, because that would undoubtedly be quite annoying, but the target area for more likely letters expands.
If a game is enough fun that someone would pay $3 instead of deleting the free version and saying the hell with it, then the game is probably worth the money.
But anyways, one of those little inconvenient realities of the world is that most people cannot afford to spend much time making things unless they get paid for it. If Google is trying to create an app marketplace where developers can't make a living, then that's their choice, but then they shouldn't expect many people to expend time and resources making apps.
Don't be mad at Apple. They're not extorting anybody. They're offering lots of apps, a huge percentage of which are free, and most of the rest being pretty cheap. Could it just be that millions of people who have bought their phone also have a couple bucks to throw at some little games?
And they're not stopping you from doing so here. They're just saying that once you've modified that hardware, you're no longer welcome to connect to their network. It might be a crummy and lazy way of dealing with some of the potential problems of modified hardware, but it doesn't make any sense that it should be illegal.
The obligatory car analogy follows:
You can buy a car and modify it in pretty much any way that you wish, but there are plenty of things that you might do to it that would then make it illegal to drive it on public roads. It's not illegal to make those modifications, but those modifications do have consequences.
It's not a terrible complicated idea, but at the same time, it's not something that's commonly done, most likely for reasons of cost. If they've managed to find a way to make this cheap enough to install that it could reasonably be considered for the average building, then that'd be something worth talking about.
If it's reasonably cheap, it could find a good bit of commercial use.
I don't think this invention is being touted as a militarily useful tool. It's intended to help with the cleanup of the bazillions of mines that are still hidden in many many parts of the world where fighting has long since stopped, but the mines still remain behind.
If the US military needs a path through a suspected minefield, they're not going to spray this stuff, wait a few hours, then send some soldiers out to individually dig up all the green spots. They've got machines that are basically giant armored bulldozers that they can use to cut a straight path through. They also have trucks that basically fire a chain of explosives that clear out a straight path. But it's not feasible to use these techniques for large scale clean up because there's too much ground to cover, and it's a very destructive process.
So you're probably right that if someone was laying down a minefield this afternoon they could find some fairly easy ways to counter this bacteria. Fortunately, I don't think anyone is going to spend the time and expense to spray explosive residue around a bunch of mines that were buried in WW2
I am a longtime loyal Apple customer, and I entirely agree with you. Anything that forced me to watch an ad in order to use a device that I've already paid for is not going to get any of my money.
That being said, I really have a hard time believing that Apple actually intends to put this into any of their products. For a company that's all about the user experience, this would entirely stomp all over any enjoyment that you might get out of using their devices. Apple is plenty smart enough to realize this.
It'd be one thing if Apple was broke and so desperate for income that they were willing to try something so crazy, but right now they're making money almost as fast as they can count it. It seems really unlikely to me that they'd be foolish enough to actually implement this sort of scheme, it'd likely be significantly damaging to their brand, and all that for questionable short-term benefit.
It's doing alright, depending on what sorts of games you enjoy playing. Despite all the talk about "changing the way we play games", Nintendo has gone pretty middle-of-the-road with the Wii, hence the Wiimote including buttons and not being 100% reliant on movement. In fact, Nintendo has released games for the Wii that are primarily intended to have you hold the wiimote sideways and basically use it like an old-school controller.
The motion sensing is really cool and fun when it gets integrated properly into a type of gameplay that it's appropriate for. It is annoying and stupid when developers map random motions to random actions within a game just because they feel compelled to because it's a Wii game.
As for the performance of the wiimote hardware itself, it was never quite as accurate as a lot of people expected. Generally movements didn't really translate 1 to 1 in terms of things on the screen moving exactly like you moved the remote. There is also often a little bit of lag with the remote, which can be noticeable and annoying depending on what type of game you're playing. Nintendo has recently released an small add-on attachment to the controller that is supposed to make it more accurate. It definitely makes a difference in the few games I've played that take advantage of it, but I don't have enough experience with it to say for sure.
At the end of the day, I don't think that the wiimote has "killed" the traditional buttons based controller. But then again, I don't think Nintendo ever intended it to, and even if they once thought that that might be possible, they've since decided that buttons are here to stay.
If you haven't had the chance to try out a Wii controller, you should give it a shot, it's pretty amusing.
There's definitely a ton of benefit in writing something down. If I write a list before going to the grocery store, I'm much more likely to remember to buy everything I need, even if I forgot to bring the list with me. The conscious act of understanding something even just enough to spell it and put it onto paper greatly increases the chances that I'll remember it and understand it.
Glenn Beck long ago gave up any right to make that argument. In fact, that was the whole point of the website in question.
He creates rumor and slander on his shows and in his writing, and defends it with his First Amendment rights. For him to then turn around and whine(or sue) when someone gives him a taste of his own medicine is entirely hypocritical. Not that it's surprising that he's a hypocrite, it's really the only way to be as ideological as he tries to be.
There is a downward force trying to accelerate you, it just can't because your feet are attached to the bar. It does, however, accelerate the various fluids in your inner ear parts. Those same inner ear parts detect the movement and your brain interprets that so you know that you're upside down.
But going back to the original issue, gravity is always applying an accelerating force on you. It's just that if you're standing on the ground, the ground pushes back with an equal force (for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction). Intuitively it doesn't seem to make any sense, because it doesn't feel like you're moving, but that force from gravity is always acting on you.
If this is so inevitable, then why weren't the bananas that I bought the other day covered in dozens of advertising stickers?
Oh yeah, it's because most people like for their produce to look nice, and wouldn't buy a piece of fruit that they couldn't visually inspect. Drawing all over a fruit with a laser is almost as visually obtrusive as putting stickers all over it, and would cause most people to look elsewhere.
Yeah, but it sounds like Carmack's argument is that he thinks that he could do even better yet again if they had an extra flight. Which makes sense, every time you do a test flight, you learn something, and so that should make your next flight even better. Take this further, and if your ultimate goal is to get the best possible design, then the contest should never end, because there's always room for improvement.
But in reality, when you create a contest, you have to have rules and you have to have a deadline. Bending the rules for one team but not the others is generally unfair. The extra day most certainly did help, because apparently their craft was unable to fly on its three "regulation" attempts.
I think you're on the right track in that it has more to do with the social nature of certain activities. Being a good football player is not a mindless activity. A good quarterback can instantly recall dozens if not hundreds of plays, knows what to expect from each of his players in every one of those plays, can quickly read a defense's set up, and make some accurate predictions about how that defense will affect the play he's about to run. That's some pretty intense mental gymnastics, and certainly isn't any less impressive than the amount of knowledge crammed into the brain of someone who writes kernel patches for Linux or whatever.
The big difference in terms of social standing is that it's about a million times more fun for a bunch of people to get together and watch this guy play football than it is to watch this other guy sit and write code. We can argue for hours about the relative contributions that each guy is making to the human race. The QB in the superbowl might be entertaining tens of millions of people, while the programmer's code might be helping run the mobile phones of millions of those same people.
But humans are generally very social, and there's not much of a better way to become popular than to entertain a bunch of people. If your talents and interests don't take you in that direction, well, all paths in life aren't equal, that's just how the world works.
A new capsule is being developed. But the basic idea is indeed very similar to the capsule on top of a rocket that spaceflight started with. The shuttle is an amazing job of engineering, but at the end of the day, it turned out that making a vehicle capable of gliding to a landing isn't an effective way of reducing cost per launch.
It's just another self-professed "gamer" complaining that a game company is focusing its products and marketing at people other than him. Nintendo started making strong plays towards the casual market years ago, and yet there are still nerds out there who refuse to accept that their beloved video game company doesn't exist for the sole purpose of serving them specifically.
Let's just step back, take a deep breath, and think about this for a second. Now repeat after me:
"The telecoms do no operate in a free market"
Phone and cable companies are basically giant collections of government granted local monopolies. I live in a large urban area that has about a million people within a 20 minute drive from my house, and yet I only have two crappy options for broadband. My situation is not unique.
These companies have guaranteed markets, and basically guaranteed profit. In exchange for that, they should be expected and legally required to provide a certain level of service. In regards to my internet connection, unless I'm doing something to actively harm the network, they've got no business telling me where I should or shouldn't get my packets from.
All that being said, I'm curious what innovation you've been seeing from the telcos that you think is so important to protect? These guys are basically dumb pipes. They just string the infrastructure across the land. They don't design and manufacture switches and servers, they just plug them in and connect them with wires. They don't design the web services that I use, nor do they create the content that I read. They don't make the movies that I watch, and they don't design the games that I play.
They, at best, provide the infrastructure that other people/companies use to innovate. If you can't see how placing arbitrary restrictions on that infrastructure can negatively affect those other people/companies, then you're not trying very hard.
The mannequins are maybe be a newer thing then, I've worked with designs for a couple of medical education facilities (attached to medical schools) where they've talked about them. It might be more accurate to refer to them as robots, they're apparently rather complex and expensive.
But whatever, substitute dead bodies for mannequins in my previous comment, and it's still making the same point.
Yeah and simulated surgeries are not exactly like real surgeries because the doctor knows that the mannequin won't actually die if he/she screws up, so why bother having them practice that way?
If you've got a way to simulate all of those things that you've listed, then let the ESA know, I'm sure they'd love to learn about it. Otherwise we'll just have to accept the fact that sometimes science requires baby steps, and that just because something is not perfect doesn't mean that it's useless.
No, if you've got just a small complaint with your particular job, then go find another job, in the same field if you think the chances are good that you won't run into the same problem. In the specific case of a pharmacist, I don't think it's reasonable to expect to find a job at a drugstore anywhere in America where you can be sure that you won't run into somebody wanting access to something like the morning-after pill. It's not a 0.1% of the time thing. If you can manage your schedule in such a way that there's always someone else there who can step in and take care of it, then I guess that's not too bad. But if something happens to mess that up, and even just once you find yourself stuck in a position where you feel the need to turn someone away looking for help that they are legally entitled to, and which it is your job to provide, then you have massively failed at your job.
If a programmer doesn't want to work on predator drones because they're used to kill people and you're morally opposed, I can respect that, and if one day their boss comes up and asks them to, it isn't necessarily unreasonable for that programmer to ask to work on something else. But if you applied for that job, interviewed there, and accepted a position knowing full well that the place primarily worked on defense contracts, then I see no reason to feel sorry for you if your boss asks you to pack you stuff and leave. You've knowingly put yourself into a position that you should expect to compromise with your morals. Go find a job somewhere else.
Your IT guy and mechanic examples don't work, because you're referencing to actions that are just plain illegal. If the morning after pill is legal where you live, then as a pharmacist, you should be expected to provide it in accordance with the law. If you cannot do than, for whatever the reason, then you're not qualified to be in that line of work.
Nobody is being held at gun point and having needles forced into their arms. If your job responsibilities conflict that strongly with your ethics and morality, then quit and go find a new career.
Why should an employer have to change their job description to match whatever arbitrary limits an employee decides their morals have put on their work? A pharmacist refusing, for any personal reason, to fill a legitimate subscription provided by a doctor is a bad pharmacist and should go find a career that doesn't conflict with their morals.
You can't go get hired as a stripper and then complain that taking your clothes off in front of strangers is wrong to you. Some people just aren't cut out for certain lines of work.
While your theory will work much of the time, down here in the deep south the summers are so hot and humid that the airflow from the windows being down doesn't really make you feel much better. It's entirely miserable and every year I wonder why I live here. Without A/C, I don't think I'd be able to stand it.
Well maybe that's why he suggested that they ask to see their resumes, rather than suggesting that they immediately throw a bucket of money at them and put them in charge of their calculator division.
The idea isn't that you can ignore doing your normal due diligence in regards to hiring, it's more that here's a potential pool of applicants that have shown at least some basic understanding, but more importantly a personal interest in your product. Not a surefire thing, no doubt, but it's not the worst place I can think of to look for potential employees.
A good example of this sort of thing is Valve. They not only encourage their customers to tinker with and mod their games, but if someone does something that really impresses them, they've got a history of inviting those people to their offices and seeing if they might be interested and able to contribute in a more official way. That's not to say that they browse through gaming forums and hire everyone who managed to make a crappy TF2 map, but they see the communities that evolve around their products as a potential resource.
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Is the amount of evidence really the defining difference between a theory and a hypothesis? My formal scientific education ended back in high school, so maybe I'm wrong here, but I thought a hypothesis was more of a prediction about the results of a specific experiment or observation, while a theory was a proposed set of rules that worked in a more general sense.
A simple theory of gravity might be "all matter attracts each other", while a related hypothesis could be "If I release this this rock off the edge of a building, the mass of the earth will attract the mass of the rock and the rock will fall."
Language is a tough thing to pin down.
Another thing that's nice about touchscreens is that the relative sizes of various buttons can change on the fly. The iPhone virtual keyboard dynamically resizes the area of different letters depending on what letter proceeded it. For example, if you just typed the letter 'c', the next letter you want is much more likely to be 'a' than 'z', so the 'a' button area becomes larger and the 'z' gets smaller. It doesn't change the visual size of the button on screen, because that would undoubtedly be quite annoying, but the target area for more likely letters expands.
If a game is enough fun that someone would pay $3 instead of deleting the free version and saying the hell with it, then the game is probably worth the money.
A "Bunch" of money is a relative term.
But anyways, one of those little inconvenient realities of the world is that most people cannot afford to spend much time making things unless they get paid for it. If Google is trying to create an app marketplace where developers can't make a living, then that's their choice, but then they shouldn't expect many people to expend time and resources making apps.
Don't be mad at Apple. They're not extorting anybody. They're offering lots of apps, a huge percentage of which are free, and most of the rest being pretty cheap. Could it just be that millions of people who have bought their phone also have a couple bucks to throw at some little games?
And they're not stopping you from doing so here. They're just saying that once you've modified that hardware, you're no longer welcome to connect to their network. It might be a crummy and lazy way of dealing with some of the potential problems of modified hardware, but it doesn't make any sense that it should be illegal.
The obligatory car analogy follows:
You can buy a car and modify it in pretty much any way that you wish, but there are plenty of things that you might do to it that would then make it illegal to drive it on public roads. It's not illegal to make those modifications, but those modifications do have consequences.
It's not a terrible complicated idea, but at the same time, it's not something that's commonly done, most likely for reasons of cost. If they've managed to find a way to make this cheap enough to install that it could reasonably be considered for the average building, then that'd be something worth talking about.
If it's reasonably cheap, it could find a good bit of commercial use.
I don't think this invention is being touted as a militarily useful tool. It's intended to help with the cleanup of the bazillions of mines that are still hidden in many many parts of the world where fighting has long since stopped, but the mines still remain behind.
If the US military needs a path through a suspected minefield, they're not going to spray this stuff, wait a few hours, then send some soldiers out to individually dig up all the green spots. They've got machines that are basically giant armored bulldozers that they can use to cut a straight path through. They also have trucks that basically fire a chain of explosives that clear out a straight path. But it's not feasible to use these techniques for large scale clean up because there's too much ground to cover, and it's a very destructive process.
So you're probably right that if someone was laying down a minefield this afternoon they could find some fairly easy ways to counter this bacteria. Fortunately, I don't think anyone is going to spend the time and expense to spray explosive residue around a bunch of mines that were buried in WW2
I am a longtime loyal Apple customer, and I entirely agree with you. Anything that forced me to watch an ad in order to use a device that I've already paid for is not going to get any of my money.
That being said, I really have a hard time believing that Apple actually intends to put this into any of their products. For a company that's all about the user experience, this would entirely stomp all over any enjoyment that you might get out of using their devices. Apple is plenty smart enough to realize this.
It'd be one thing if Apple was broke and so desperate for income that they were willing to try something so crazy, but right now they're making money almost as fast as they can count it. It seems really unlikely to me that they'd be foolish enough to actually implement this sort of scheme, it'd likely be significantly damaging to their brand, and all that for questionable short-term benefit.
It's doing alright, depending on what sorts of games you enjoy playing. Despite all the talk about "changing the way we play games", Nintendo has gone pretty middle-of-the-road with the Wii, hence the Wiimote including buttons and not being 100% reliant on movement. In fact, Nintendo has released games for the Wii that are primarily intended to have you hold the wiimote sideways and basically use it like an old-school controller.
The motion sensing is really cool and fun when it gets integrated properly into a type of gameplay that it's appropriate for. It is annoying and stupid when developers map random motions to random actions within a game just because they feel compelled to because it's a Wii game.
As for the performance of the wiimote hardware itself, it was never quite as accurate as a lot of people expected. Generally movements didn't really translate 1 to 1 in terms of things on the screen moving exactly like you moved the remote. There is also often a little bit of lag with the remote, which can be noticeable and annoying depending on what type of game you're playing. Nintendo has recently released an small add-on attachment to the controller that is supposed to make it more accurate. It definitely makes a difference in the few games I've played that take advantage of it, but I don't have enough experience with it to say for sure.
At the end of the day, I don't think that the wiimote has "killed" the traditional buttons based controller. But then again, I don't think Nintendo ever intended it to, and even if they once thought that that might be possible, they've since decided that buttons are here to stay.
If you haven't had the chance to try out a Wii controller, you should give it a shot, it's pretty amusing.
There's definitely a ton of benefit in writing something down. If I write a list before going to the grocery store, I'm much more likely to remember to buy everything I need, even if I forgot to bring the list with me. The conscious act of understanding something even just enough to spell it and put it onto paper greatly increases the chances that I'll remember it and understand it.
Glenn Beck long ago gave up any right to make that argument. In fact, that was the whole point of the website in question.
He creates rumor and slander on his shows and in his writing, and defends it with his First Amendment rights. For him to then turn around and whine(or sue) when someone gives him a taste of his own medicine is entirely hypocritical. Not that it's surprising that he's a hypocrite, it's really the only way to be as ideological as he tries to be.
I agree. Shall I start with the angry misspelled profanity and name calling, or would you like to kick things off?
There is a downward force trying to accelerate you, it just can't because your feet are attached to the bar. It does, however, accelerate the various fluids in your inner ear parts. Those same inner ear parts detect the movement and your brain interprets that so you know that you're upside down.
But going back to the original issue, gravity is always applying an accelerating force on you. It's just that if you're standing on the ground, the ground pushes back with an equal force (for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction). Intuitively it doesn't seem to make any sense, because it doesn't feel like you're moving, but that force from gravity is always acting on you.
If this is so inevitable, then why weren't the bananas that I bought the other day covered in dozens of advertising stickers?
Oh yeah, it's because most people like for their produce to look nice, and wouldn't buy a piece of fruit that they couldn't visually inspect. Drawing all over a fruit with a laser is almost as visually obtrusive as putting stickers all over it, and would cause most people to look elsewhere.
Yeah, but it sounds like Carmack's argument is that he thinks that he could do even better yet again if they had an extra flight. Which makes sense, every time you do a test flight, you learn something, and so that should make your next flight even better. Take this further, and if your ultimate goal is to get the best possible design, then the contest should never end, because there's always room for improvement.
But in reality, when you create a contest, you have to have rules and you have to have a deadline. Bending the rules for one team but not the others is generally unfair. The extra day most certainly did help, because apparently their craft was unable to fly on its three "regulation" attempts.
I think you're on the right track in that it has more to do with the social nature of certain activities. Being a good football player is not a mindless activity. A good quarterback can instantly recall dozens if not hundreds of plays, knows what to expect from each of his players in every one of those plays, can quickly read a defense's set up, and make some accurate predictions about how that defense will affect the play he's about to run. That's some pretty intense mental gymnastics, and certainly isn't any less impressive than the amount of knowledge crammed into the brain of someone who writes kernel patches for Linux or whatever.
The big difference in terms of social standing is that it's about a million times more fun for a bunch of people to get together and watch this guy play football than it is to watch this other guy sit and write code. We can argue for hours about the relative contributions that each guy is making to the human race. The QB in the superbowl might be entertaining tens of millions of people, while the programmer's code might be helping run the mobile phones of millions of those same people.
But humans are generally very social, and there's not much of a better way to become popular than to entertain a bunch of people. If your talents and interests don't take you in that direction, well, all paths in life aren't equal, that's just how the world works.
A new capsule is being developed. But the basic idea is indeed very similar to the capsule on top of a rocket that spaceflight started with. The shuttle is an amazing job of engineering, but at the end of the day, it turned out that making a vehicle capable of gliding to a landing isn't an effective way of reducing cost per launch.
It's just another self-professed "gamer" complaining that a game company is focusing its products and marketing at people other than him. Nintendo started making strong plays towards the casual market years ago, and yet there are still nerds out there who refuse to accept that their beloved video game company doesn't exist for the sole purpose of serving them specifically.
Let's just step back, take a deep breath, and think about this for a second. Now repeat after me:
"The telecoms do no operate in a free market"
Phone and cable companies are basically giant collections of government granted local monopolies. I live in a large urban area that has about a million people within a 20 minute drive from my house, and yet I only have two crappy options for broadband. My situation is not unique.
These companies have guaranteed markets, and basically guaranteed profit. In exchange for that, they should be expected and legally required to provide a certain level of service. In regards to my internet connection, unless I'm doing something to actively harm the network, they've got no business telling me where I should or shouldn't get my packets from.
All that being said, I'm curious what innovation you've been seeing from the telcos that you think is so important to protect? These guys are basically dumb pipes. They just string the infrastructure across the land. They don't design and manufacture switches and servers, they just plug them in and connect them with wires. They don't design the web services that I use, nor do they create the content that I read. They don't make the movies that I watch, and they don't design the games that I play.
They, at best, provide the infrastructure that other people/companies use to innovate. If you can't see how placing arbitrary restrictions on that infrastructure can negatively affect those other people/companies, then you're not trying very hard.
The mannequins are maybe be a newer thing then, I've worked with designs for a couple of medical education facilities (attached to medical schools) where they've talked about them. It might be more accurate to refer to them as robots, they're apparently rather complex and expensive.
But whatever, substitute dead bodies for mannequins in my previous comment, and it's still making the same point.
Yeah and simulated surgeries are not exactly like real surgeries because the doctor knows that the mannequin won't actually die if he/she screws up, so why bother having them practice that way?
If you've got a way to simulate all of those things that you've listed, then let the ESA know, I'm sure they'd love to learn about it. Otherwise we'll just have to accept the fact that sometimes science requires baby steps, and that just because something is not perfect doesn't mean that it's useless.
No, if you've got just a small complaint with your particular job, then go find another job, in the same field if you think the chances are good that you won't run into the same problem. In the specific case of a pharmacist, I don't think it's reasonable to expect to find a job at a drugstore anywhere in America where you can be sure that you won't run into somebody wanting access to something like the morning-after pill. It's not a 0.1% of the time thing. If you can manage your schedule in such a way that there's always someone else there who can step in and take care of it, then I guess that's not too bad. But if something happens to mess that up, and even just once you find yourself stuck in a position where you feel the need to turn someone away looking for help that they are legally entitled to, and which it is your job to provide, then you have massively failed at your job.
If a programmer doesn't want to work on predator drones because they're used to kill people and you're morally opposed, I can respect that, and if one day their boss comes up and asks them to, it isn't necessarily unreasonable for that programmer to ask to work on something else. But if you applied for that job, interviewed there, and accepted a position knowing full well that the place primarily worked on defense contracts, then I see no reason to feel sorry for you if your boss asks you to pack you stuff and leave. You've knowingly put yourself into a position that you should expect to compromise with your morals. Go find a job somewhere else.
Your IT guy and mechanic examples don't work, because you're referencing to actions that are just plain illegal. If the morning after pill is legal where you live, then as a pharmacist, you should be expected to provide it in accordance with the law. If you cannot do than, for whatever the reason, then you're not qualified to be in that line of work.
Nobody is being held at gun point and having needles forced into their arms. If your job responsibilities conflict that strongly with your ethics and morality, then quit and go find a new career.
Why should an employer have to change their job description to match whatever arbitrary limits an employee decides their morals have put on their work? A pharmacist refusing, for any personal reason, to fill a legitimate subscription provided by a doctor is a bad pharmacist and should go find a career that doesn't conflict with their morals.
You can't go get hired as a stripper and then complain that taking your clothes off in front of strangers is wrong to you. Some people just aren't cut out for certain lines of work.
While your theory will work much of the time, down here in the deep south the summers are so hot and humid that the airflow from the windows being down doesn't really make you feel much better. It's entirely miserable and every year I wonder why I live here. Without A/C, I don't think I'd be able to stand it.
Well maybe that's why he suggested that they ask to see their resumes, rather than suggesting that they immediately throw a bucket of money at them and put them in charge of their calculator division.
The idea isn't that you can ignore doing your normal due diligence in regards to hiring, it's more that here's a potential pool of applicants that have shown at least some basic understanding, but more importantly a personal interest in your product. Not a surefire thing, no doubt, but it's not the worst place I can think of to look for potential employees.
A good example of this sort of thing is Valve. They not only encourage their customers to tinker with and mod their games, but if someone does something that really impresses them, they've got a history of inviting those people to their offices and seeing if they might be interested and able to contribute in a more official way. That's not to say that they browse through gaming forums and hire everyone who managed to make a crappy TF2 map, but they see the communities that evolve around their products as a potential resource.